The Down To Lunch Story

🍴 The Craziest Month Of Our Lives

Joe and I (Nikil) graduated from Stanford, moved to San Francisco, and really missed hanging out with our friends because we were working all of the time. It was really hard to coordinate hangouts and we wished we always surrounded by our friends like in our dorm at college.

We thought it would be really awesome to be able to press a button and see who was free to hang out. So one Sunday afternoon we sat down, blasted some One Direction, started coding, and Down To Lunch was born. 🙌

Within 48 hours, Down To Lunch (aka DTL) got really popular among our friends and sparked a ton of awesome spontaneous lunches and dinners.

A freshman at the University of Georgia randomly found DTL and it started spreading like wildfire through the school. We had put our phone numbers in the app so you could text us if you had any questions (not at all realizing how big it would get). We started getting 5000 text messages a day. No joke. Our phones stopped working and we couldn't receive calls and texts for months. 😂

In January, DTL spontaneously exploded across the country. We spent many long days blasting 90s pop and coding shirtless in our apartment (some days working non stop from 9am to 5am) just to keep the app running. In addition we personally responded to every one of the tens of thousands of students who were texting us.

We started getting literally tens of thousands of messages (like this one) from college students across the country saying how awesome DTL was and how they had been hanging out with their friends so much more through it.

Down to Lunch hit a new milestone - students started having DTL themed parties 🎉

DTL is continuing to blow up and is used by students all around the country. And we're just getting started! 🙌

Want to be part of this epic movement and join the Team DTL Family? Get in touch!